


clarity

by rainingover



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Boys In Love, Canon Universe, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Secret Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25932115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Jaehyun accepts the truth: that he’s in love with Johnny, and that he’s incapable of holding a conversation with him without having to go somewhere quiet and die a little bit afterwards.(Or, Jaehyun's in love, in pain, and he watches a lot of Johnny fancams.)
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 51
Kudos: 452





	clarity

Jaehyun has tried his hardest to ignore what his feelings for Johnny really mean for years now, with differing degrees of success over time.

At first, when they were much younger, not long after they'd met, he’d been able to put the feeling down to the kind of competitive tension that’s natural between trainees. After debut, he’d managed to convince himself the feelings were platonic—a brotherly bond, familial, _safe_ _—_ and it had worked for a while, but he had never truly believed it.

Then he had tried to rationalise further. Had thought, maybe this isn’t a Johnny thing at all. Maybe he was just lonely, or horny, or whatever. All of the members are attractive, he'd reason, and if this was all just pent-up loneliness or wanting someone to cuddle with, Johnny shouldn’t be at the forefront of his mind all the damn time.

But he was.

Jaehyun buried it, then, for a while. When he was rooming with Johnny it felt nearly impossible, but he managed to ignore the suffocating longing most nights just enough to enjoy his company as a friend. Johnny is a good friend, and he'd been a good roommate back then. He was clean, tidy, courteous. He played music when Jaehyun couldn't sleep at night and kept it down when Jaehyun needed rest, and there were nights when Jaehyun fell asleep out of breath from laughing so hard.

On the flip side—because there's always a flip side, Jaehyun finds— there were some nights that he couldn't keep his mask in place. Nights when Johnny: the soft hairs around his hairline damp from washing his face, body lean and tanned and gorgeous, would fall asleep with the light on, the lamp beside his bed bathing him in in a soft orange-glow, and Jaehyun couldn't remember how to breathe. Their beds seemed to magically shift closer, although maybe they'd been this close all along, and Jaehyun could almost reach out and touch him.

Instead, Jaehyun would get up and walk around the bed, turn off the lamp and try not to count his eyelashes.

It was easier when they stopped rooming, but not _easy_. It's never been easy. Even now—now, he still wonders if this will pass, and he spends a lot of time just looking at other people, to see if something will spark inside of him. Girl group members, company seniors, anyone who passes by his dressing room at Inkigayo to say hello, he waits for the tell-tale flutter to emerge in his belly.

He sneaks glances at Jungwoo when he’s laughing, sleeps next to Jungwoo on the cooler nights at the dorm, let’s Jungwoo sit on his lap while they watch the television. Jungwoo is attractive. He’s _attractive_ , stupidly so and Jaehyun acknowledges it, but the knowledge slips over him easily. It doesn’t settle under his skin and make a home there, not like the way he feels about Johnny has done.

Now, when Jungwoo falls asleep with the light on, Jaehyun falls asleep too. 

It’s not the same.

Donghyuck pulls him into a hug in the practise room one morning, rests his head on Jaehyun’s shoulder, and holds his hand. Jaehyun watches Johnny warming up across the room.

He looks at Johnny as he stretches. He's wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, so it’s not like his body-line can be seen underneath when he moves, but Jaehyun pictures it anyway.

He probably spends too much time watching Johnny that day. He looks at Johnny when they all grab lunch at the company building. He looks at Johnny that afternoon, catches him in the sort of sunlight that makes people look like they've just descended from heaven, and his heart falls out of his stomach and is trampled on by the seven other members stepping out of the minibus with them. He looks at Johnny and feels longing, so heavy it could sink him, if he let it. He hasn’t let it, _can’t_ let it. Yuta looks back at him as they head into the studio and calls, “Last one in for make up has to buy the coffees remember?” but Jaehyun is too far inside his own head to care.

He accepts the truth: that he’s in love with Johnny, and that he’s incapable of holding a conversation with him without having to go somewhere quiet and die a little bit afterwards, or, depending on how the conversation has ended, locking himself in the nearest bathroom stall and jerking off.

The latter usually happens when they’ve been drinking, or when they’re kind of tired, tense and wound tightly up, frissons of energy behind the whites of their eyes. Sometimes they disagree on something, something small and insignificant and Jaehyun thinks, _see, I’m not in love,_ but then Johnny shakes his head and laughs and says, “You made a solid argument, Jaehyun-ah. I’ll think about what you said,” and a sweet, sticky rush of joy floods Jaehyun’s veins, and he’s gone again. Totally floored.

If Jungwoo isn’t in their room, he pushes the desk chair up against their door and gets himself off in an emabarrased sort of fervour, and then feels terrible for it when Jungwoo returns to their room, smiling and unassuming. Not that Jungwoo won’t have ever done something similar. It’s a given at this point that all of them have probably inadvertently touched something another member has jerked off near. That’s just basic mathematics: five guys, one apartment, three bedrooms, one sofa. The auntie who looks after them collects their laundry twice a week, but there’s always something dirty on the floor— a towel, a pair of boxer briefs, a T-shirt no one even remembers who owns. These walls must hold a myriad of secrets, he guesses. He wonders if his is the worst.

Jaehyun is just thankful he doesn’t share a dorm with Johnny anymore because the thought of getting off in the same space as him does something to his brain these days that makes him lose every bit of modesty he thought he had. Sometimes he wonders how Johnny gets off five floors below. Wonders how he likes it and the way he looks, blissed out and flushed after he comes. What sort of porn he watches, or if he even watches it when he’s jerking off. He imagines catching Johnny in the middle of it, imagines Johnny catching him. And then he realises he’s thinking about Johnny more often than not when he’s getting off, even if he hasn’t seen him in days.

Even when they haven’t had overlapping schedules for a while, when 127 have finished promoting and he’s been shopping with Mark and Jungwoo two days in a row and for dinner with Taeil, and then he’s had a solo shoot for W and another dinner, this time with Hyuck too. When Jaehyun hasn’t seen Johnny for over a week and a half, he’s still imagining being held down and fucked by him when he’s jerking off in the shower before bed. 

He's in love with Johnny, he knows that, and he's definitely in lust with him, and it's difficult to breathe sometimes when he's around. Accepting it doesn't seem to make it any easier.

Their radio show starts up again and they spend their late nights in the warped kind of domesticity that comes with hosting a show together. The calm of the studio, the reassuring nods of the producer across the room and the knowledge that the webcams are filming them only partially registering each time the ads play and they pause to check the script, joke about something, smile at each other. 

Johnny’s gaze is always felt, encouraging him when he’s speaking, teasing him when he trips up. Johnny is the careful hand at his back when he’s unreasonably nervous before a guest he admires comes on and the squeeze of his leg under the table to signal a private joke. Johnny’s just _there,_ beside him, for him, always. It’s just the two of them, and the whole world listening in, and it’s about as intimate as anything has ever felt in Jaehyun’s life.

It’s when they’re recording Night Night that Jaehyun lets himself wonder if there’s something between them that, with a little clarity, could actually be within reach.

“You’re wearing new cologne, right?” Johnny says one night while a song plays, leaning in to Jaehyun’s side. He’s so close that Jaehyun can feel the warmth from his skin on the side of his neck.

He grips the pen he’s holding tightly. “Yeah.” It’s funny, really, how so many of his actions are done with impressing Johnny in mind, but the mere thought that he has noticed one of them is cripplingly terrifying.

Johnny leans away again, taps his own pen against his script. “It smells good,” he says. “Very very you.” 

“Very me?”

“Yeah. Like...” Johnny shrugs, like it’s no big deal. He glances back at Jaehyun who is trying to untangle his brain. “It just suits you. I like it.”

“Thanks.” Jaehyun hopes he isn’t too obviously glowing from the compliment, like maybe if he tries hard enough he’ll be able to only internally give in to the lovely, cloying feeling of being in love. “You can borrow it if you want. I’ll bring it down to your dorm next time I come down.”

Johnny hums a refusal. “It wouldn’t suit me.” Jaehyun can feel Johnny’s eyes on him. “I like it on you.”

“You can borrow it,” Jaehyun repeats lamely. His mouth feels like it’s filled with sand. “Remind me tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Johnny murmurs, looks down at his script and studies it intently. He never reminds Jaehyun to lend him the bottle, and Jaehyun doesn’t mention it again. 

Part of Jaehyun knows that the conversation wasn’t about cologne at all, but there’s a larger part of him that refuses to engage himself in the internal conflict that is inevitable when he considers the possibility that maybe, possibly, on some level, Johnny likes him too. He’s thought about it before, but the image is blurry, and it doesn’t feel like something that could be tangible.

It feels make-believe, desperate, delusioned. 

He doesn’t want to be that guy. He doesn’t want to be _desperate,_ but then come the fancams.

Jaehyun loads up the youtube app on his phone when he gets into bed and types into the search bar without really thinking about it. The search results are diverse and they seem to go on forever, more and more videos loading as he scrolls. His mouth is dry. This is crossing a line, he thinks. This is too far. _But it’s okay_ , he thinks, _it’s just this one time._

(He’s wrong about that.)

It’s on a night when he’s alone. He’s alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles, because they don’t have to share anymore and that’s fucking amazing, and he’s bordering on delirious—the kind of giddiness that comes with the power of being completely alone, jetlagged and restless after a long day which would have stretched any person to the brink of their limits.

He’d sat next to Doyoung on the plane, and they’d flown through the night, sleeping against each other’s shoulders. Johnny had been sitting in the row in-front, his head resting against the window, black hair fanned around his head from where Jaehyun could see. Jaehyun had pulled up his sleep mask, watched Johnny the back of his sleeping head and wondered what he was dreaming of. Had Johnny ever dreamt of him, he wondered. Of _them_? Would it mean anything if he did?

Jaehyun had pulled down his mask in the end and he'd gone back to sleep, and when he'd woken up hours later it was to Johnny’s smiling face, his arms resting on the top of his seat as he stood awkwardly; clearly too tall to stand comfortably there in the cramped space under the overhead lockers. He’d grinned down at him as Jaehyun had rolled his shoulders. “Was I drooling?” he'd asked, feeling self conscious. 

Johnny had shaken his head. “No. I just took a photo of you,” he’d said. His voice was soft, quiet. Mark still asleep in the seat next to him. Doyoung hadn’t been in his seat anymore; he was across the aisle now, watching something over Taeyong’s shoulder. “You looked peaceful. Sorry if I woke you up.”

“Can I see the photo?” Jaehyun had asked. Johnny smiled at him.

“Later,” he’d said. But then they’d landed and travelled straight to a radio show, and they’d pretended to be interested in the questions they’d been asked thirty, forty times before.

Jaehyun had sat there, in the brightly lit room, in a stiff leather jacket. He'd smiled blankly and thought of Johnny with his soft, smiling eyes that read like a book in a language Jaehyun had never quite managed to grasp, while they answered questions about their favourite American celebrity and whether they’d eaten at In-n-Out burger.

Then there'd been dinner, then piling into a hotel room for a live stream, and now, this: alone, crisp hotel linen, hot shower. Typing _Johnny nct solo cam_ into youtube.

He’s met with a long list of options. Too many. Not enough. Jaehyun ignores the weird knot in his chest that tells him this is a stupid idea. He knows it’s a stupid idea; falling in love with Johnny was a stupid idea. Falling in love with anyone is pretty stupid if you really think about it.

Jaehyun opens the first video that he sees, which is from a Kick it performance at MusicBank. It's Johnny in his music video outfit: tanned skin for days, barely-there straps of black over his chest, and something behind his eyes that makes Jaehyun’s mouth water. He sees glimpses of other members at first, and it feels wrong, the song playing too loudly in the quiet of the empty hotel room, but he finds that after thirty seconds it’s easy to forget about the context of the video (him there, to the right of the camera, him dancing, blinking into the lights, hoping he looks good) and to focus on only Johnny and his body lines, the way his hips move, the darkness in his eyes as he stares down the lens. The song becomes a blur of noise, drowning out the ringing in his ears as he slides his hand into the front of his boxers. It's not a fancam of a performance he was there for anymore. Now it's just Johnny, only Johnny.

(“There are different ways to love,” someone had said to him once. A friend from an older group, with their own twisted dynamics and a bond no outsider would ever be quite able to comprehend. He can’t remember who it was, now. He wasn’t sure he understood at the time. “And it’s better just to love all of your group mates in the right way the way you’re expected to. Like they’re your family, like you're brothers in arms, you know? I’m just saying this because… because I’ve seen people go through some really shitty times when they’ve got caught up in their feelings and it’s rarely worth it. Not that I think you'd be like that, just... Don't get hurt.”

Jaehyun understands it now. He really wishes that he didn’t.)

He watches the video three times, the same video on repeat as he works himself over with his hand and pretends it’s not his hand at all.

There is a night, not long after this, during the same tour, when Jaehyun thinks that Johnny is going to kiss him.

They’ve just finished the last night in a string of shows, and the prospect of a morning off from rehearsing looms over them like an unsettling reward. It’s a weird sort of feeling: relief mixed with leftover adrenaline and the fear at the very, very back of the mind that, in theory, they might never tour again, depending on what the company does or doesn’t have in store for them, depending on whether they have fans tomorrow, so many variables that leave them teetering on the edge between fame and obscurity.

They have dinner near the venue, share a whole load of dishes, and they drink—not a lot, a few beers, a bottle of wine someone at the other end of the table orders, Jaehyun isn’t sure who. They drink, which means they end up buzzed in that tired sort of way that jaehyun finds always turns his limbs to soft, warm, caramel.

When they get to the hotel, three of their keycards are missing from their managers wallet, so Mark invites Johnny into his room to wait for a new key to be sorted. Doyoung goes with Taeyong, as if anywhere else isn’t even an option. Jaehyun doesn’t know what to do, where to go, and he hesitates, and Jungwoo calls his name, but then he is following Mark and Johnny into the elevator.

Mark smiles at him. “I’m sure you’ll be in your rooms again soon.”

“Until then, party in Mark’s room!” Johnny grins at him. 

Mark shakes his head. “No way. My agenda is shower and then sleep for six hours.”

“That’s the dream.” Johnny sighs. “I hope this mix up is sorted out quickly, I want to face-plant onto my bed.”

As soon as they sit down on the couch in Mark’s room, warm and comfortable, Johnny is falling asleep. Jaehyun sits next to Johnny and scrolls through Naver as they wait for the manager to return with the rest of their room keys. Mark locks the bathroom door behind him and shouts, “Goodnight!” at them through it. It's funny how much they all crave silence after a long day of being together, but he gets it.

Johnny stretches, long arms, long legs. Jaehyun tries to ignore how it makes him feel, stares at his phone and doesn’t read a word. His phone locks itself when he hasn’t touched it in a while, and when he looks back up, Johnny is awake, looking over at him with an unreadable gaze.

He smiles sleepily. “You’ve gone red from the drinks.” 

“Have I? My cheeks, is it?” Johnny’s face is closer than he’d expected it to be when Jaehyun turns to face him. He asks. Questions seem safe, he can’t tell Johnny how much he loves to see him like this— sleepy, soft around the edges, perfect— when he’s only asking questions. “Is it really noticeable?”

“Yeah.” His eyes crinkle in genuine happiness. He reaches out a hand and it brushes Jaehyun's ear. “And your ears, and your neck too. It’s cute.”

“Thanks.” Jaehyun remembers that it came out in a sort of whisper; barely leaving his mouth at all. Inside, he's molten gold. 

“You’re welcome.” Johnny is still smiling, still drowsy in the way he moves. He licks his lips. “The blush looks kinda good on you.”

Jaehyun finds this suddenly very funny, because what else can he do when the only other option is to panic?

“Is that your best pick up line?” He asks. He laughs, once, but it fades away quickly. Johnny blinks slowly. Neither of them move, or maybe they move closer, Jaehyun is trying not to think too hard about it. 

“Hmm? Yeah.” Johnny blinks slowly. Jaehyun isn’t listening out for the shower running in the ensuite bathroom anymore. “Did it work?”

“Honestly?” Jaehyun looks at Johnny’s face at how impossibly long his eyelashes seem from this close up, and then at the perfect Cupid’s bow of his lips. When he looks back up to meet Johnny’s eyes, the air feels like it’s still around them, like it's not even there, like there's no air, no room, no space between them. 

Jaehyun closes his eyes.

“Argh, what the—“ Mark appears then, door to the bathroom swinging open as Jaehyun opens his eyes again. He’s naked, horrified, a wild look in his eyes that instantly cuts through the tension on the other side of the room. He hurries to wrap a towel around his waist. “I thought you’d have got your keys and gone by now! Why is everyone always in my room when I’m trying to be naked!”

Johnny bursts into laughter. He sits up a little, more awake now. “Ha, we saw your dick,” he says in a sing-song voice, and everything is so different, so normal, that Jaehyun could almost believe he dreamt the last five minutes.

“Fuck off.” Mark flips them off with one hand, still holding his towel with the other one, and Jaehyun can’t be mad at him for ruining the moment, because the moment had been stupid and reckless, and was against every unwritten rule in the book about living and working with the people you love. 

Their manager lets himself into the room a few minutes later with the keycards they’re waiting on, and Mark complains again that he’ll never get a minute's peace, but he’s joking and their manager takes no notice anyway. Jaehyun rides the elevator to the next floor with Johnny, not daring to look at him, and then he lets himself into his hotel room, and lies in the dark, overthinking the way that Johnny had said goodnight in the hallway.

Jaehyun has to get out of bed after a couple of hours of trying to drown out the buzzing in his head. He pulls on a pair of shorts and goes down to the hotel gym to distract himself, but when he gets down there he realises that there is already someone in there with their back to him, working out on a mat in front of the mirrored wall.

He leaves quickly, before anyone sees him there hovering at the door, and heads back to his room and jerks off to the image of Johnny’s toned shoulders instead.

“I thought I saw you last night.” Johnny nudges his arm at breakfast the next morning. 

“What?” Jaehyun is still only half awake from the restless night before. “Where?”

“The gym.” Johnny’s eyes are swimming with curiosity. Jaehyun freezes. “You didn’t..?”

“No. I was in my room,” Jaehyun says. “Sleeping.”

“Oh.” Johnny hums. “Okay. Thought I saw you down there, that’s all.”

Jaehyun picks at his breakfast. The silence deafens him. “Why were you in the gym at three in the morning?” He asks, finally.

“How do you know I was there at three?” Johnny asks, and maybe Jaehyun knows he should take this chance to tell the truth, but he _can’t._

“I guessed,” he says, blinks blankly while Johnny smiles. “That’s all.”

Neither of them mention it again.

Sometimes he thinks about that night and what might have happened if Mark had taken a longer shower. He wonders what it means that Johnny was awake at three in the morning, just like he was. What it means that he comes with tears at the corner of his eyes more often than he used to, thinking of Johnny, wishing it were Johnny, and what it means that his new most-watched Johnny video on YouTube is a compilation of his most tender and genuine smiles, even over the sexy clips.

Jaehyun knows what it means; it means that he’s fucked this all up, and the only way to fix things is to stop dying inside after they talk, stop thinking about Johnny fucking him, stop wanting to hold his damn hand when they’re sitting next to each other.

Except, he doesn’t know how to stop, and there’s a part of him doesn’t actually want to. There’s another part of him, too, that wonders if Johnny might want to fuck him too. Or kiss him, at least. Maybe not hold his hand.

Whatever. He loads up the Kick It fancam while Jungwoo is out having dinner with Yuta and Taeil and he doesn’t even jerk off to it this time, just lies on top of his bed and chews his lip while he watches it.

He feels more pathetic than he has in a long, long time.

It's a rainy Tuesday at the company building and they're doing an interview to accompany a magazine shoot they did as a group a few days before. It's not a proper interview, which Jaehyun is grateful for— he isn't up for sitting with a stranger this afternoon. Instead, a questionnaire has been emailed over for each of them to complete, to be published next to their photos. They sit around a big table in one of the free boardrooms and answer the questions by hand, and the questions are all the standard stuff: name three items you would take to a dessert island, what is your current coffee order, describe your ideal type. 

Jaehyun tries to remember what answers he's given for these questions in the past. He looks over Doyoung's shoulder to see what he's putting, but he's answering them out of order.

“What are you gonna put down under ‘Ideal Type’?” Jungwoo asks aloud, maybe to no one in particular, maybe to everyone.

Yuta says, "I’m putting Mark Lee.” 

Mark looks up from across the table. "No, you're not." He looks wary, but also amused. 

"Watch me." Yuta grins.

Jaehyun laughs. “I’ll put Johnny then,” he replies, and it’s meant to match the joke, but no one at the table laughs. Maybe they didn’t hear. Jaehyun hopes so, looks straight back down at his questionnaire and doesn’t dare to breathe until someone else speaks.

“You should put Mark Lee too. We should all put Mark Lee!” Yuta says. His laugh is feral. Mark groans, but seems to accept his fate easily, and Hyuck laughs happily from across the table. 

Johnny grins, that genuine, fond, smile that takes over his whole face and says, _oh, you guys._ Jaehyun loves that smile.

Afterwards, once the questionnaires have been scanned in and emailed over to the magazine by the team, they head back home. “What did you put down then?" Johnny asks him before they get into the car. "For the ideal type question?”

“Uh, someone outgoing and kind." Jaehyun wonders if his words are as transparent as he feels they are. "What about you?"

Johnny ducks his head. “I was distracted by everyone, I couldn’t think of anything profound. So I just put someone who laughs a lot.”

“At you or with you?” Jaehyun asks him, laughing.

Johnny narrows his eyes. “That was uncalled for. You’re lucky I’m very forgiving.”

“That’s so kind of you," Jaehyun grins at him, and Johnny smiles back. 

It's nice, even if Jaehyun's heart is beating too fast inside his chest. The pseudo-flirting that comes with close proximity to Johnny Suh has always charmed him, and it still charms him now. He can feel his ears burning.

Jaehyun stares out of the window, fists clenched, and spends the rest of the journey watching trees and houses bleed into each other, a blur of colour past his window. His heart rate returns to normal after a while, but Johnny’s name is still etched into it.

He watches the recommended videos on his youtube account that night, and they all feature Johnny.

A few days later, they go out for coffee, just the two of them, and something about it feels so organic that it could only have been orchestrated by the universe herself.

Johnny hovers nearby as Jaehyun signs a napkin for the girl behind the counter and then he steers them to the very back of the coffee shop, where the tables are tightly cramped, but out of the way of the prying eyes at the front-windows and any fans that may be in the area.

"We haven't done this in a while,” Johnny says. Steam rises from his coffee cup and he blows on it softly. It makes the hairs on Jaehyun’s arms stand on end and distracts him from digesting the words that Johnny has spoken.

"What?"

"Hung out outside of schedules, just the two of us,” Johnny explains. “ I miss it."

"You do?" 

Johnny smiles. "You _don't_?"

"That's not what I said." Jaehyun takes a sip of his coffee, but it burns his lips. "I guess it's been harder since we started living separately."

Johnny considers this, but seems to brush it away. "No, it’s way more recent than that.”

"Hmm. I suppose Taeil-hyung has been practising his grilling a lot. I'd miss out on trying all of his food if I ever left the apartment." He laughs. _Also, I avoid you when I'm feeling weak,_ he doesn't add. _And I’m feeling weak right now._

Johnny smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes and Jaehyun wonders how transparent he’s being. “I’d hate for us to stop being close,” Johnny says. 

“So would I.” Jaehyun rips open a packet of sugar that he has no intention of putting in his coffee. “But we won’t. We’re friends, right?” 

“Yeah.” Johnny blows onto his coffee again. “That’s okay then.”

Jaehyun vows to start acting more like the person Johnny has come to miss. Someone who doesn’t feel an ugly gurgle of jealousy rising in his throat when they see him patting Donghyuck’s hair. Someone who can cope with Johnny’s playful brand of intimacy. Someone who can look away from him easily, eyes sliding away without a thought—without wondering if he’s stared too long and if anyone’s noticed.

When Johnny pokes his cheek playfully, Jaehyun does it back. When Johnny slaps his thigh, crying with laughter at the silly argument that Taeil and Jungwoo are having across the room, Jaehyun laughs. When Johnny winks at him one morning on the way to a shoot, Jaehyun rolls his eyes, and it’s easy, at least until he forgets.

He watches as Johnny gets his make-up done before a music show, meets his eye in the mirror while the make-up artist is bent down and working on cover-up on his chin, covering a small blemish, or a shaving nick, maybe. Johnny mouths “What?”

Jaehyun shakes his head. "I'll tell you later," he mouths back, and he hopes that Johnny will forget about it. 

He has nothing to tell, he was just looking, just zoning out, wondering how sticky the gloss on his lips would be to kiss an replaying fancams in his brain. 

Just dying, as usual.

Johnny doesn’t forget about it, much to Jaehyun’s disappointment. He’s there, in the hallway of the dorm on the fifth floor, as Jaehyun and Doyoung share out the take-out they all ordered on the way home.

“Hey.” Johnny hovers behind Doyoung.

Doyoung gives him a confused look, says, “Thought you didn’t order anything?” as he heads into his own room balancing cartons. He doesn’t wait for Johnny to answer, just shuts his door behind him and leaves him staring at Jaehyun.

“Uh, I have to get this food up to the others,” Jaehyun explains, as he tries to make an exit, but Johnny calls his name before he can get away. Or maybe Jaehyun is waiting for him to call it. It’s unclear.

Johnny calls his name and waits for him to turn back to face him. “What was that about this morning?" He asks.

"What?”

"In the dressing room," Johnny reminds him. “You were looking at me like… Like… I don’t know.”

Jaehyun swallows the lump in his throat. Panic courses through him, makes him feel dizzy. "I don't remember that," he lies. “Sorry, I have to get back up to the others to feed them."

"Jaehyun-ah?" Johnny steps forward and lowers his voice, apprehensive. He scratches behind his ear. It’s funny, Jaehyun thinks, because he looks as awkward as Jaehyun feels.. “Are we… We're okay, aren't we? I know we talked about it in the cafe a couple of weeks back, but..."

"Of course we are.” Jaehyun clutches the take-out bag like it’s a life raft, or a barrier. A barrier between him and his fucked up feelings. “Why wouldn't we be?"

"No reason." Johnny doesn’t look satisfied with how the conversation is going. Jaehyun wants to turn and _run_. “It’s just—Be honest, okay? Have I upset you?”

“No.” Jaehyun shakes his head. “You’ve never upset me.”

“Then why were you staring at me this morning?” Johnny asks again, and Jaehyun is angry that he won’t just let it _go_ , but he isn’t angry with Johnny, he’s angry with himself. Angry about getting caught, angry about putting himself in this position. Why couldn’t he just love Johnny the way he loves Doyoung and Yuta and the rest? “I need you to tell me why.”

Jaehyun can’t find the lie that his tongue is desperately searching for.

Johnny steps even closer, the hallway is eerily silent. Jaehyun is reminded of that night in Mark’s hotel room. His heart hammers underneath his sweater. Johnny is watching him carefully, closely. "Please tell me."

Jaehyun takes a step back. “I can’t.” He closes his eyes.

“If you don’t want to say it, can I… Can I guess?”

“Believe me, hyung, you don’t want to know.” Jaehyun’s voice comes out in a whisper, strained and desperate. “I’m sorry, I can't do this right now.”

Johnny doesn’t push any further and Jaehyun could sigh with relief if it wouldn’t make his predicament completely obvious. Or more completely obvious that he’s sure it already is.

He manages to keep it together as the tension between them splits in two and he dies, figuratively speaking, anyway. And maybe Johnny understands, because he leans back, out of Jaehyun’s space so that he can breathe again. Jaehyun loves him a lot in that moment. _You're the best man I know_ , he thinks. _And I’m the worst._

Jaehyun pulls the door to the fifth floor apartment closed behind him and takes the stairs up to the tenth floor two at a time. 

Jaehyun doesn't eat the food he’d ordered. He slips away to his room while the others gather round the kitchen table to wolf down the dishes. He tries to distract himself from the looming chokehold of panic in his chest by messing around on his phone, but opening his youtube app only reminds him of how into Johnny he is and for how long he’s felt this way; which is too much and for too long, and it _hurts_. 

He thinks about what Johnny had said earlier and wonders what he was going to guess is going on in Jaehyun’s head. Part of him is certain that he can’t know the truth, but that part of him is doubting that he’s actually been that subtle about his feelings. Maybe he’s not been subtle at all; every time he’s stared too long, pined from up too close, he’s given himself away. Every time he’s laughed too hard at Johnny’s jokes or smiled for too long when Johnny has laughed at his. Every time he’s reacted to the way that Johnny touches him oh-so-easily, like he’s dipping his hand into water and not into the flames that Jaehyun feels inside his chest.

Johnny probably knows and he’s just too kind to tell him to stop pining and stop wondering what it would be like to be pressed up against a wall by him, and to look somewhere else for once. Johnny probably knows, he thinks, but he refuses to imagine a positive outcome to that and instead he lies there in the quietness, every so often hearing laughter and shouts from the kitchen as his friends enjoy themselves.

Jungwoo comes into the room a while later. “I’ve saved you some food,” he says. “You’ll have to reheat it.”

“Thanks.” Jaehyun is still in his clothes, still lying on his bed, still failing to distract himself from his own thoughts. 

“Are you sick or just feeling shitty?” Jungwoo asks him. He is feigning nosiness, but Jaehyun can tell that he’s genuinely worried. That’s how they work in this strange, claustrophobic beehive of a group that make up their career and their family. “If you’re sick, I won’t try to spoon you in the night.”

Jaehyun smiles at Jungwoo’s attempt to cheer him up. “Feeling shitty,” he admits. “Thanks for asking.”

Jungwoo smiles back at him. “If you need to cry, my pillow is used to it, you can borrow it.” His eyes sparkle with good humor.

Jaehyun laughs. “I’ll cry quietly,” he says. “So you can get your beauty sleep.”

“Seriously though, hyung. If you need to talk anything over I’ll listen and try to help.” He pushes a headband over his forehead. “I’m going to wash my face, but I won’t be long.”

Jaehyun wants to cry. He imagines talking things over with Jungwoo. He imagines being honest, saying “I’m in love with Johnny.” He imagines Jungwoo hugging him, telling him that it’s okay. He imagines Jungwoo feeling awkward about it, imagines it ruining the harmony of their rooming, imagines Jungwoo feeling burdened by the secret, burdened by _him_.

Before Jungwoo returns, Jaehyun gets up and heads out of their room to ask Mark if he wants to go for a walk, because it’s the only thing he can think of and he _can’t_ be there when Jungwoo gets back. He can’t talk about it.

Mark sounds suspicious when Jaehyun calls him, but he doesn’t say no, and they walk to the convenience store in the dark, Mark chatting to him easily about things that don’t involve his feelings or why he is always moping around and locking himself in his room, and basically acting like a complete asshole because he can’t deal with his feelings for one of the members. 

He can’t talk about it and yet everyone seems to want to talk about it. Even Mark, who directs the conversation away from which movie they’re all going to watch the next night and into dangerous territory with a surprising ease. There’s no meandering, he just comes out and says, “So, what is going on between you and Johnny?” and then looks at Jaehyun expectantly. He doesn't even use formal language, but then, they're a beehive now, and they don't have a queen. They're all the same: one dysfunctional family who love each other in different ways.

Jaehyun looks at Mark, eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Uh.” Mark clears his throat. "You know."

“Mark? What has he told you?” Jaehyun is hesitant, thinks maybe he doesn’t really want to know. "What's he said?"

Mark shrugs. “You’re being weird with him. No, he _thinks_ you’re being weird with him. But he doesn’t know if it’s just him overthinking.”

“Right.” Jaehyun chews on his lip. “Okay.”

“What’s going on? You know that he really cares about—”

“Look, I just swerved Jungwoo to avoid talking about Johnny.” Jaehyun sighs as they cross the street. The headlights of cars that have stopped for them to cross seem impossibly bright. “Earlier, I swerved _Johnny_ to avoid talking about Johnny. I’m _not_ talking about Johnny to anyone tonight.”

Mark laughs. “You just said Johnny a lot of times for someone who isn’t talking about him.”

Jaehyun groans. “Look, I’ll— I’ll fix it. Just, please don’t… Don't ask me anything else about it.”

“My lips are now sealed.” Mark mimics zipping up his lips and then cringes at himself, and it's refreshing— it’s a normal, safe, silly interaction, the sort that Jaehyun has been missing since he got lost inside his own head, and as they walk the rest of the way to the store in an amicable silence, Jaehyun feels like he can breathe properly for the first time in hours. 

Johnny watches something on his phone on the plane to Japan the week after, and Jaehyun closes his eyes, half-listening to the conversation in the row behind him, trying to drown out the waves crashing in his head.

Jaehyun hadn’t meant to end up sitting next to Johnny, but by the time they’d got through security and passport control, Doyoung was way ahead of him and Johnny had waited while Jaehyun stopped to tie his shoelace, which was kind of him but not necessary, so then here they were sat together, arm brushing arm in the cramped aisle of seats, Jaehyun pretending to be engrossed in the inflight magazine until take-off and then this eyes closed, hardly breathing, the weight of Johnny’s leg against his, the warmth of it. 

In a way, he’s missed the time when he could cope with this when he’d buried the feelings deep enough to pretend they weren’t there at all. When Johnny couldn’t tell. When he wasn’t acting weirdly or pulling away or thinking about taking Johnny’s hand and shoving it down his pants.

His half-sleep comes to an end with Johnny patting his leg. Jaehyun opens his eyes and looks down, then up. Johnny is frowning. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he says. “But my phone battery just ran out; I thought I had like 13% left but it’s gone off.”

“That sucks.” Jaehyun can still feel Johnny’s hand on his leg. 

“Yeah.” He sighs. “I was in the middle of watching a documentary.“

“You can borrow mine,” Jaehyun cuts in, getting out his phone. It’s not like he’s using it right now. “It’s no problem. Is it Netlfix you want?”

Johnny shakes his head. “It’s on youtube,” he says. 

Jaehyun hums a response and closes his eyes again. Johnny’s hand definitely isn’t on his leg anymore, but he can _still_ feel it. Maybe he shouldn’t sleep, in case he has a dream he can’t recover from. Maybe he shouldn’t be watching so many Johnny videos; they really are fucking with his brain, he thinks. He’s even started to watch those fanvids set to music, the ones the fans make and upload to—

Oh, _shit_.

Jaehyun’s heart plummets into the pit of his stomach. Johnny is using his phone. Johnny is using his phone to watch something on YouTube. Johnny is watching something on _his_ YouTube account, which he used yesterday to watch Johnny fancams. And five nights ago when he stayed awake far too late watching recordings of their radio show. And six nights ago, and nine nights ago and, and, and...

He opens his eyes and looks at the phone in Johnny’s hands and there it is: his truth. All of his recommended videos on the app homepage are Johnny. Johnny performing Punch, Johnny onstage in Chicago, JCC clips, Johnny sexy compilation 2020 _._ _Fuck_. 

Johnny just looks at him.

“Uh, I don’t know how…” He trails off. He knows he’s gone red, very red, and he’s panicked himself into a stupor and can’t even think of a way to explain this away. There _isn’t_ a way to explain this away. It’s here now, in the open, and it’s strangely comforting, really. This is the end of everything— his friendship with Johnny, any respect any of the other members had for him, all of it—and he’ll just have to accept that.

“You know, you could just stop avoiding me. I exist outside of youtube too.” Johnny smiles at him, gentle, kind. His voice is low, so the others around them can’t hear their conversation. 

Jaehyun’s brain can’t keep up. He doesn’t look mad, but maybe pity would be worse. He goes to unbuckle his seatbelt.

“Hey don’t go. What are you gonna do?” Johnny asks. His damn hand is on Jaehyun’s leg again. “Jump out of the plane?!”

Jaeyun’s belt unclicks but he doesn’t move. He couldn’t anyway, Yuta is fast asleep in the aisle seat next to them and if he leaves the row he’ll be making a scene. “If I have to.”

“Mark spoke to me,” Johnny tells him. “He thinks that we’re being idiots. He said, “hyung you’re both idiots” and told me I had to stop assuming you understand how I feel.”

Jaehyun blinks rapidly. He wonders what it would actually be like to open the emergency exit door and plummet to the floor, just like his heart already did inside of his chest. “What? How do you feel?”

“The same way you do, I think.” Johnny gestures to Jaehyun’s phone. “I wasn’t sure at first, and I kept trying to get you to talk to me about it but I did a shitty job at it.”

“The same way I do? Are you sure about that?” Jaehyun swallows. He lowers his voice even further. “Because I think I love you. Not—not in the way I love the others, the way we're meant to.”

"There is no right or wrong..." Johnny stops. "Okay, this isn't the time for philosophy is it? I know what way you mean."

Jaehyun is still contemplating skydiving, or at least locking himself in the bathroom. "And?"

“And that’s what I was hoping. That’s what Mark thought.” Johnny nods to himself. He’s still smiling. “I’m happy he was right. Still, I couldn’t have imagined _this_ ! Most recently viewed is _Johnny sexiest moments 2020_ , Jaehyun-ah, really?”

The only thing his brain supplies Jaehyun’s mouth to say is, “It’s sexy.” Idiot.

“I just use my imagination usually.” Johnny smirks, he damn well _smirks_ , and they’re thirty-seven thousand feet in the air, thigh to thigh, strapped into fucking claustrophobic aeroplane seats with some of the people who know them best less than a metre away, at least one of them watching them closely, Jaehyun can practuclly feel his eyes boring into them. _Fucking Mark Lee, it’s lucky I love you,_ Jaehyun thinks. _Just not in the way I love Johnny._

Jaehyun takes a breath. "I can't believe this. I can't believe I gave you my phone."

Johnny takes his hand between the seats, like it's something he _wants_ to do and Jaehyun realises that, deep down, it doesn't surprise him. 

"Would you ever have told me the truth without me seeing this?" Johnny asks, almost hesitant. 

"Probably not," Jaehyun admits. "In fact. Can we… Can we pretend the last five minutes didn’t happen?”

“But..."

“Just until we land, I mean.” Jaehyun needs time to breathe, to collect his thoughts and put them into some sort of order, and he can’t do that right now. “And then we… I’ll talk to you, properly,” 

“Yeah, sure.” Johnny pauses. “Hey, if I try to kiss you in the hotel tonight, will you let me?” He's still holding Jaehyun's hand, and Jaehyun thinks, _no fancam can compare._

“Maybe,” Jaehyun replies, but he definitely, _definitely_ will.

  
  



End file.
